50 Resources for Equipping the Church on Homosexuality and Same-Sex Marriage

50 Resources for Equipping the Church on Homosexuality and Same-Sex Marriage

The Gospel Coalition exists to serve the church. To help fulfill this mission, TGC has joined with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention to provide a broad range of resources on homosexuality and same-sex marriage issues to prepare your church for a changing culture.

If you’re looking for something to share with people in your church in order to better equip them to discuss homosexuality, same-sex attraction, same-sex marriage, or the biblical view of sexuality, consider one of the following 50 resources:

Four years ago, our current President said he personally opposed same-sex marriage. Today, the Supreme Court has found a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage, contra all recorded sociopolitical, religious, and human history.

Talking to Family and Friends

If you consider yourself a Bible-believing Christian, a follower of Jesus whose chief aim is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, here are important questions I hope you will consider before picking up your flag and cheering on the sexual revolution.

To my friends in the church embracing gay marriage, I offer these four “appeals.” I don’t expect those who have studied this issue thoroughly and landed squarely in that camp will necessarily find these appeals new or convincing. But I’m also seeing a lot of Christians, particularly younger millennials, whose openness to gay marriage seems to me more impulsive, emotional, uncareful.

When the Bible uniformly and unequivocally says the same thing about a serious sin, it seems unwise to find a third way which allows for some people (in a church, organization, or denomination) to be for the sin and other people to be against the sin.

Recently my teenage son came home telling me of a conversation with an unbelieving friend about the gospel. He was encouraged to have been able to talk through specifics of what the truth of the gospel is and how someone becomes a Christian.

With seven words—“It is going to be an issue”—the U.S. government signaled to orthodox Christian colleges and universities that if they don’t drop their opposition to same-sex marriage they will lose their tax exempt status.

This has gotten complicated, and the Supreme Court ruling just made things worse. Being a pastor in 2015—a world in which whatever you feel, you are—makes communicating a biblical sexual ethic difficult.

Those of us who believe in biblical marriage must also be careful to speak in a way that acknowledges the growing number of men and women in evangelical churches who have desires for persons of the same sex and know that God does not want them to act on those desires.

Below is my response to an e-mail I received that asked the following question: “I believe church should be for all of God’s children. No exceptions. I am a gay man. My question is, would I be fully accepted with no judgment and fully welcome and able to serve at Ashland Avenue Baptist Church?”

The Bible says the Lord alone is God and we should have no other gods before him. Not the state, not the Supreme Court, not our families, not our friends, not our favorite authors, not our cultural cache. No gods but God.

I would argue that the situation is very different from photographing some other event, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the clients’ sexual or marital context. The fact that this is a wedding means there’s a different moral question for you.